One of my friends was recently interviewing and was asked to create an API for tic tac toe. As far as interview questions go it seems like a reasonable problem for demonstrating programming understanding but I want to one-up the interviewers by solving the game in Alloy. Continue reading →

A confluence of events at work recently reminded me of the schema drift problem. The concrete instance or how it comes about doesn’t really matter because the end result is always the same: there is some code on a server somewhere that is running with a version of a schema that is no longer valid. It will continue to work as long as nothing is restarted because the ORM only validates assumptions during startup but as soon as the server is rebooted everything is broken. Continue reading →

No one will remember the code you wrote but they will remember what kind of person you were. This means you should work on your people skills before working on your technical skills. Learn to define yourself by things other than the code. Learn to be kind, honest, and brave. Learn to be a person before a programmer.

Create a cron job that polls a github repository for changes and runs some tests using an LXC sandbox. For extra bonus points think about serving the test results from files using Apache or NGINX directory listings. Your polling script will also need to use GitHub’s status API to report results. For extra extra bonus points see if you can do it all with just bash and some utilities like jq.